Panel discussion
Science lives through discussions and the exchange with others. One important topic that is still very controversial in the EU, particularly in Germany, is green genetic engineering and with it the future of modern agriculture. To give people the opportunity to build their own opinion regarding this topic we decided to organize a panel discussion. Since the pandemic situation prevented us from organising a panel discussion at the university, we decided to do it online and stream everything live via YouTube. In order to have a diverse discussion, we invited different participants from agriculture, politics, media, and science.
Participants
Our first participant was Prof. Dr. Andreas Weber from the Institute of Plant Biochemistry (Heinrich-Heine University), who provided the discussion with scientific facts and gave insights on the problems of green genetics, particularly in Germany.
Additionally, we invited Robert Bossmann. He is a local farmer and member of the political party "Bündnis 90/Die Grünen". As a farmer, he explained how green genetic engineering could affect agriculture in practice.
To get insights on how the media affects the decision-making of people about genetically changed organisms, we invited Rainer Kurlemann. He works as an independent science journalist and brought some interesting aspects to the discussion.
Last but not least, we invited René Röspel, who was able to give us some political views on this controversial topic, through his work as a member of the "Bundestag" and the ethical committee for the party "SPD". The "Bundestag" is the German federal parliament.
The moderation was led by members of our team, Lucas Müller and Christian Dohmann.
About the discussion and conclusion
After a short introduction by every panellist, the discussion started with some questions by our moderator. Shortly after, the audience began to ask questions too. The main focus of the discussion was whether green genetic engineering is useful and necessary for modern and sustainable agriculture. Another point of contention was why the EU and in particular Germany is doing so little to help the research and advertisement for green genetic engineering. The panellists had different opinions on those subjects. But still, most of them thought genetic engineering has to get more opportunities and chances because it might be able to create a wide variety of new technologies that will lead to a better and more sustainable future. We also should discuss this topic in public more often, to give people the opportunity to build their own opinion.
Obviously, one and a half hours is not enough time to discuss such a complex topic, so there was no final consensus. But this was not our intention. We still successfully created an open dialogue between scientists, politicians, farmers, and our audience with our panel discussion.
In conclusion, the panel discussion was successful. A lot of people watched our livestream and asked questions, which the experts heavily discussed. All in all, we are very happy to contribute to the exchange with people and give them different views on this complex and controversial problem. We want to thank the panellist for their expertise and participation and the audience for your interest in green genetic engineering and the future of sustainable agriculture.
Newsletter
To keep people who are interested in our project updated, we sent out a monthly newsletter. There, we gave overviews over our progress in research and outreach but also the progress of our project in general. We also gave insights into the development and future of our project.
After a short introduction about our progress as a whole, we presented our improvement in research. As the vision became clearer on what our project should look like, we showcased our ideas after early brainstorming and the progression of lab work over the year in all the different subtopics of our project.
Afterwards we presented our outreach-related progress in a new abstract. There, we showcased our meetings with other iGEM-Teams or with experts. In this abstract, we also stated how our project evolved through the exchange with others and through their feedback.
Furthermore, we used the newsletter as an information tool to remind people of different dates regarding events organized by us, for example for our panel discussion.
The newsletter was a really good way to keep in contact and inform interested people about us and the growth of our project. We want to thank all our readers for your interest in our project and synthetic biology in general.
Social Media
Nowadays, it is very important that scientific work not only takes place in the laboratory behind closed doors but is also discussed openly in society. In the current very controversial discussion on the subject of green genetic engineering, it is a pity that many prejudices, fears, and fake news are still widespread in society leading to distorted views on the topic. As young scientists, we therefore see it as an essential task of our generation to provide further information and to exchange opinions with the broad public so that we can also use green genetic engineering in Germany or even Europe in the future. To provide information, we have started a weekly event on our Instagram account @igem_duesseldorf, which is called GMOnday. As the name suggests, over several weeks we have created high-quality posts on the subject of genetic engineering in which we clarified various possible uses, advantages, and disadvantages of GMOs and how they influence our lives today. Even though we are pro green genetics, we tried to keep the posts objective and informative, also including justified criticism on the topic.
In addition, we posted the so-called "FactFriday" in our "Story" every Friday. We picked out interesting scientific facts every week and wanted to elicit the answer from our followers with an estimation question. This was well received by many visitors to our account.
In addition to our weekly posts and events, we also uploaded other content. For example, we reported on famous scientists on their birthdays or commemorations. We presented what they have been working on and how their work influences our life and our work today.
Furthermore, our social media channel on Instagram was also a good communication platform for exchanging ideas with other teams. Especially when the corona pandemic or the long distances prevented direct meetings, our social media platform allowed us to get in touch with other teams.
Press Release
To further communicate our project, we could not only rely on digital media, so in order to reach all people, we decided to create a press release. With the help of Dr. Arne Claussen, who works for the press and public relations department at the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf, we wrote an article to spread the word about our project. On the 15th of July, our article was released through the HHU press channel: Universität Düsseldorf: Wie Drohnen und DNA Ernten retten können. In a matter of days, other websites and even regional newspapers used our article and published it.
What was surprising is that a farmer, who lives in a different state than us, saw the article and reached out to us to talk about the project. Seeing that the article had that kind of impact that someone, in turn, reached out to us was magical.
We did also have the opportunity to write an article for the BIO/spektrum magazine, which specializes in molecular life sciences. This assisted us to communicate our message in the scientific world.
